Continued from part 3, on what happened in Eden

God has created something new: a world made of matter. He has created new family members out of matter to represent him in this new world. And he has put them in a place where they can meet his existing family members, who are not made out of matter—the sons of God. Together, they will constitute a ruling family-council, with Adam in charge of the world.

Related: If Adam thought Satan was a good guy, was his transgression justified?

The serpent, hoping to have rulership of the world passed to him, tempts Adam to get himself executed by defying God. But this plan to wrest dominion of the world backfires badly. In Genesis 3:14–15, not only is Adam not executed as promised, and the serpent not put in charge, but God rather ironically reverses Satan’s pretensions: promising to make him of less worth than not just Adam, but even the animals. Even worse—he promises Eve a descendent to mortally wound Satan!

The ongoing corruption

Related: Death and the curse

We discover that God uses death as a term to describe not summary execution, but separation—Adam dies by being separated from God (cf. John 1:4), and thus his body will eventually expire, as a flower will eventually wither when cut from the root. But although Adam is kicked out of Eden, and doesn’t have access to God’s council any longer, he retains dominion over the world. That is part of the creation mandate. He goes out, and he is fruitful and multiplies, and he rules over the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea.

But the serpent and his cronies are not so easily deterred. Indeed, they are pot-committed.

And so in Genesis 6 we see something really weird happen—something that surely is directly related to the curse on the serpent, which says:

I will put enmity between you and the woman,
    and between your seed and her seed;
he shall strike your head,
    and you shall strike his heel. Genesis 3:15

We tend to interpret “seed” here as referring to spiritual offspring. This is certainly a legitimate gloss—Jesus himself interprets it this way when he calls the Pharisees sons of the devil in John 8:44 (cf. Matthew 23:33 etc). Either God is your Father, or the devil is:

Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever practices righteousness is righteous, as he is righteous. Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God. By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother. 1 John 3:7–10

If you are born of the flesh, you are born of Adam, and God puts you under the adoption of the devil, the serpent. If you are reborn of spirit (John 3:5), you are born of Jesus, and God adopts you as his own children.

But how did this happen? It starts in Genesis 6, with a seed that is not merely spiritual:

And it happened that, when man began to multiply on the face of the land, daughters were born to them. Then the sons of God saw the daughters of man, that they were beautiful. And they took for themselves wives from all that they chose. And Yahweh said, “My Spirit shall not abide with man forever in that he is also flesh. And his days shall be one hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were upon the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God went into the daughters of man, and they bore children to them. These were the mighty warriors that were from ancient times, men of renown.

And Yahweh saw that the evil of man was great upon the earth, and every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was nothing but evil continually. And Yahweh regretted that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart. And Yahweh said, “I will destroy man whom I created from upon the face of the earth, from man, to beasts, to creeping things, and to the birds of heaven, for I regret that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in his eyes. Genesis 6:1-8

Related: What is Genesis 6:1–4 talking about?

Now what is going on here? Well, we aren’t given all the details, but we do see that some of the sons of God take human wives. They sire a physical seed to compete with the line of Eve—giant half-breeds who are later named as Israel’s special enemies (Numbers 13:33). Evil and violence subsequently get so bad that God determines to destroy the entire world, leaving only one loyal survivor and his family.

In 1 Enoch, which I believe preserves a legitimately ancient though embellished tradition, the sons of God—there called the watchers, as in Daniel—are responsible for greatly increasing the depravity of man by teaching them things like sorcery and astrology. This is a prime motivation for the Flood, which otherwise is somewhat puzzling in terms of its timing, given that mankind was corrupt from Eden. It also explains several threads in the New Testament that play off Enochian material, where Jesus is implicitly depicted as reversing the sins of the watchers. [ Michael S. Heiser, Reversing Hermon: Enoch, the Watchers, and the Forgotten Mission of Jesus Christ (Defender Publishing, 2017).]

It’s easy to rabbit-trail on titillating narratives like this—but the only thing we need to know for understanding the kingdom of God is that Genesis 6 is the start of a long and sordid relationship between mankind and the sons of God. This relationship does not end at the flood, but in fact continues directly after it, with another event that Christians find rather puzzling: Babel. As the population of the earth increases again, the people gather together and they say to each other, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top reaches to the heavens. And let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 11:4).

We tend to read this as if the people at Babel were trying to literally climb into heaven by building a super-tall tower. But this is not what was going on. As we’ve seen already, the ancient worldview connected high places with divine presence. Mountains were where heaven and earth met. Thus, artificial mountains were a standard feature of religious practice. This was the purpose of Mesopotamian ziggurats: to establish a place where the gods could be sought; where they would presence themselves.

We have good reasons to think that the tower of Babel was in fact a ziggurat—possibly the model for the famous ziggurat in Babylon which came to be known as Etemenanki. [ John H. Walton, Is there Archaeological Evidence for the Tower of Babel? on Associates for Biblical Research (May 2008).]

The point that Genesis is making is that the people are not honoring God. They are not enacting the creation mandate under his governance. They are refusing to even spread out and multiply and fill the earth. They are choosing, instead, to stay in one place, where they will reestablish contact with the sons of God. Interestingly, Babylonian mythology puts a positive spin on this event, representing the sons of God, the Apkallu, as the ones who founded Babylon and imparted knowledge of culture and technology. [ Amar Annus, On the Origin of Watchers: A Comparative Study of the Antediluvian Wisdom in Mesopotamian and Jewish Traditions, Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha (volume 19, issue 4) (2010), 277–320.] Second Temple Jewish writings put rather a different gloss on it: the Apkallu were the ones who taught mankind things like idolatry and witchcraft. It is because of them that, at Babel, humanity actively rejects God’s rule, and seeks instead other divine beings.

Put simply, mankind refuses to rule on behalf of God—to act as his viceroys, his representatives on earth.

Although Adam ruined his representation of God by inverting the authority structure that God had established, he nonetheless retained that representation. He kept the right to rule on God’s behalf, even though he and his kingdom were desecrated by the fall; unable to properly image God or remain in his presence. Babel presupposes that this original kingdom structure is still in place: it presents us with a united community migrating east until they settle in Shinar (Genesis 11:1–2), who are “one people” (v. 6). God is still the direct ruler over this united people, who have a single territory—the earth. But this people, at Babel, actively refuse God’s rule. They will not represent him; they want instead to represent other gods.

Now, what is God to do here? He has promised that he will not wipe the slate clean and start again (Genesis 9:11). The only real option left is to finally give mankind over to what they want (cf. Romans 1:21–25).

The disinheritance of mankind

Up until this point, the world was one kingdom: the kingdom of God. Yahweh was its king; mankind was his viceroy and his people; the earth was their territory. But at Babel, God separates this kingdom into two: his kingdom, and the kingdom of Satan. Both kingdoms exist alongside each other; Adam’s kingdom is subdivided, as it were, into two—Israel, and the world:

When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage. Deuteronomy 32:8–9, ESV

The passage is an antithetic parallelism, contrasting the statements of verses 8 and 9, as indicated by the “but.” The structure demands that what is true in the relationship of verse 9 is also at least broadly true of the relationship in verse 8, only in reversed order, due to the chiasmus—if we think of Hebrew as rhyming ideas rather than sounds, it is an ABBA rhyme-scheme. (The reading of v. 8a is also ambiguous; syntactically, it could be “gave the nations as an inheritance,” which certainly makes more sense of the parallelism; I think both are true and the ambiguity is intentional.)

This establishes the following contrast:

1. Yahweh gave an inheritance to/of the nations
2. He apportioned the nations according to the number of the sons of God
2. But his portion is his people
1. He took an inheritance of Israel

The parallelism requires that what is true between Israel and Yahweh also be true between the peoples and the sons of God; thus, Moses here glosses Babel as a disinheritance of the nations: God allots territories to the divided peoples in accordance with his allotment of the peoples themselves to the sons of God. The picture is that of Luke 15:12, in which the contemptuous son demands his inheritance early—saying to his father, in effect, “I wish you were dead.” Indeed, the parable of the prodigal, though individualized, is set within a discourse on the kingdom, and is certainly Jesus’ gloss on Babel—and on how his gospel is going to reverse it. Mankind should have inherited the whole world as a unified kingdom under God: the earth was Adam’s inheritance. But they insisted on another path—they, too, being prodigal. So God divides the world among them (cf. for instance Numbers 2:1–23)…and then he washes his hands of them. They have disowned him; he therefore disowns them, and thus their right to represent him. He will no longer rule over them, but they will no longer rule for him. Rather, he gives them what they demanded: the tyranny of other gods. He apportions Adam’s kingdom to the archangels; he removes mankind’s presumptive adoption as his children, and makes them adoptive children of another disowned son: the serpent.

Thus, the archangels become their new gods, and Satan becomes the ruler and god of this world over them. This is the clear picture that emerges once we combine the clues in the Old Testament with the New Testament’s witness to Satan being in charge; there isn’t any doubt that he is the serpent of Genesis, since Revelation 20:2 explicitly says so.

Some translations of Deuteronomy 32:8–9 follow the Masoretic Text (c. 1,000 AD), which reads “sons of Israel” rather than “sons of God.” That this is a later interpretive alteration is obvious when we compare the LXX and DSS on this point. The LXX itself gives a dynamic translation that goes the other way (ἀγγέλων θεοῦ—angels of God), and some versions say υἱῶν θεοῦ—sons of God; a straight, formal translation of בני אלהים or בני אל—beney elohim or beney el, which are both attested at Qumran. Aside from the exegetical issues I adduce below, the MT’s gloss is clearly wrong since Israel did not exist at the time described: Israel’s origin is at some point after Babel; it is not included on the table of nations in Genesis 10. Moreover, בני אלהים and similar are terms of art that never refer to human beings; always to gods.

Deuteronomy 32:8–9 has a conceptual parallel in Deuteronomy 4:19–20. Whereas the former describes the nations being given over to elohim who were not Yahweh, the latter describes the other side of the punitive coin:

And beware lest you lift up your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven [צבא השמים—tsaba ha’shamayim, the standard nomenclature for the armies of heaven], you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, which Yahweh your God has allotted (חלק) to all the peoples under the whole heaven. But Yahweh took (לקח) you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance, as you are this day. Deuteronomy 4:19–20; cf. Deuteronomy 29:26

Notice again the parallelism, emphasized by the wordplay between chalaq and laqach: God has taken Israel as his own inheritance, but allotted the nations to the heavenly host (by parallel, also as an inheritance).

God does not disown all mankind. He keeps Israel—starting with just Abraham—as his portion, as his kingdom, to rule over. The rest gets broken up by tongue, according to the number of the sons of God. Presumably this is idiomatic, not meant to be taken as there being only 70 archangels; we see elsewhere that nations have multiple gods, which fits the dynastic structure of the system (e.g., Exodus 12:12).

This event, this divvying of Adam’s kingdom, is why Genesis 11 leads straight into the call of Abraham. It is the story of God creating his own kingdom in competition with Satan’s. By the same token, Deuteronomy 32:8–9 is an explanation of Israel’s existence—and what it is up against. Deuteronomy, and the rest of Scripture, presupposes this view of the world.

This also explains other parts of the Bible which are typically glossed over—or argued over. Once we have this overarching structure in place, many otherwise confounding details of Scripture become clear. A couple of examples:

1. In Exodus 12:12, Yahweh cryptically remarks that he is going to execute judgments on the gods of Egypt as he passes through the land in the final plague. One does not punish non-existent beings. These were, in fact, the sons of God who had given Pharaoh’s magicians the power to turn staffs into snakes (Exodus 7:10–12) and water into blood (v. 22). The notion that ancient people were slobbering cavemen who got so frightened by thunder that they had to invent gods to appease is not a product of careful historical study, but blind chronological snobbery. They were not worshiping non-existent gods with non-existent power—they were worshiping real gods with real power.

   If the context of Old Testament idolatry involved true interaction with spiritual beings, what should we make of passages like Isaiah 44:14–20 and Jeremiah 10:8–9 which describe idols as vanities and mere blocks of wood? I think the answer is straightforward: idols really were nothing. While idolaters may have believed that the god inhabited—or, better nuanced, perhaps became conterminous with—the idol, that belief traded on a monistic understanding of creation where representation had causal power, which is false. Moreover, there’s no particular reason to think that most gods are real. In animistic religions, for instance, there is a god for everything; the Bible is clear that there are gods who rule over nations, but not gods for storms and gods for flowers and gods for streams and whatnot.

2. The battle between David and Goliath takes on far greater significance, both in terms of simple history, and in terms of prophetic imaging. Goliath, the giant enemy of God’s people, descended from the line of the serpent, was mortally wounded by David, the man after God’s own heart, anointed to be king, from whose line came Jesus. Mull it over.

This, conveniently enough, also returns us to the point at hand—what God is doing about Satan’s rulership of the world. Psalm 82:8 says:

Rise up, O God—judge the earth,
    for you shall inherit all the nations.

Even in the conquest of Canaan, Israel failed to do a perfect job. And things pretty much got worse from there on out. As a kingdom representing God’s rule on earth, it ranged between less than perfect on its best days, and downright detestable for most of its sad history. Ultimately, Israel refused God’s rule in exactly the way the residents of Babel did: through repeated and insistent idolatry. Therefore, God scattered them into the nations he had already disowned. By the time of the New Testament, God’s so-called kingdom had largely been dispersed among the nations; the small remnant that remained was under the rulership of the foreign nation of Rome—which meant it was under the direct power of Satan (cf. Revelation 2:13; 3:9). This is why demon-possession is such a major feature of the synoptic gospels, whereas it never shows up in the Old Testament: what we have in the 400 years between Malachi and Matthew is the occupation of Israel by hostile spiritual forces, and the complete collapse of God’s kingdom.

Yet this was, in fact, all part of the plan. God intended to retake all the nations. In weakness, his strength would be perfected; the dismantling of his kingdom by Satan and the sons of God was, ironically, the very mechanism of their undoing. As he had disowned the nations, so he intended to own them again. Not just Israel: as Psalm 82 says, he plans to reclaim every nation from the rulership of the corrupt gods, and judge those gods for their rule.

Knowing this, we are now ready to move into the New Testament—and ultimately, to the modern day. This is where everything we’ve talked about starts to come together. Cosmology. The divine council. Geography and sacred space. And physical imaging of spiritual archetypes.

Continued in part 5, on when God began retaking Adam’s kingdom from Satan

 17 comments

Ryan

Even the Ten Commandments make more sense with this understanding, particularly Exodus 20:2-3.

2 “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
3 “You shall have no other gods before me. – Exodus 20:2-3

It’s going to be fun thinking through Scripture and coming up with passages that make more sense, now…

Looking forward to part 5!

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Definitely. The same is true for the third commandment. In Hebrew it is literally, “You shall not take up/carry/bear the name of Yahweh your God for a worthless cause.” We tend to think of this commandment in very individualistic terms, and certainly it does apply to individuals—but it is also a corporate command. Israel is the bearer of God’s name in the world; they are a corporate Adam, imaging God by ruling on his behalf. All the other nations are bearing the names of other gods. So it is very important that Israel does not bear Yahweh’s name for a worthless cause—that they do not represent him badly.

Jeremiah

“When we examine where kherem was commanded, and who was living there, we discover that the populations are descended from the Rephaim or Anakim—descendents of the Nephilim. Og in Bashan, for example (Deuteronomy 3; bashan in Ugaritic, curiously enough, means “serpent”). The kherem commands were instructions to eliminate specific clans descended from the sons of God. It was literally a blood feud, in which the seed of God was wiping out the abominable seed of Satan. Joshua was commanded to put the seed of the serpent to the sword.”

Are you suggesting that the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites were all descended from the Rephaim/Anakim?

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Hey Jeremiah, no, not at all. Have I missed something? I’m not aware of kherem being used universally against the seven nations. Rather, God says that he will drive them out before Israel. Rather than being devoted to destruction, the norm is for them to be displaced—to self-evacuate. It is only those who refuse who are put to the sword.

Alex, since you have presented only condescending assertions in lieu of any argument, there isn’t much to respond to. However, your assertions bear challenging in various ways:

Adam is a failure. He never ruled. Satan received rule over fallen humans at the point of disobedience.

Obviously Adam is a failure. But where in Scripture do you find Satan receiving rule over humanity in Eden? You’re just asserting this in the teeth of the evidence I’ve presented. Not only is that unresponsive to what I’ve written, but you offer no counterevidence, and no argument for your own position. A pretty poor showing.

Sanctification of material creation is achieved by Jesus who is now reigning over it (Heb. 10.3)

This is a feature of my view. Have I suggested otherwise? As a rule, one lets people finish speaking before telling them they’re wrong, and this is as much a face-saving mechanism as it is politeness, since otherwise you end up criticizing them for something they never said. So rather than shooting off your mouth half-cocked, why not wait until I’ve finished my series and have laid out my position on where Jesus fits in?

You probably should consider a ‘split headship’ view as is presented in Rom 5: Natural Headship in Adam, Representative Headship through adoption by Christ.

Again, you need to stop making assumptions. I get the impression you don’t actually understand even what I have said, let alone what I haven’t. Split headship is a feature of the kingdom theology I am articulating here, as will become clear in the next part of the series.

Also, questionable and speculative interpretations will not be load-bearing elements in your conceptional house. Better and more elegant formulations exist or can be conceived by a fuller grasp of the bible.

So instead of talking smack, why don’t you demonstrate the supposed flaws in my thesis?

Alex

It is hard to conceive a more anthropocentric post. Adam is a failure. He never ruled. Satan received rule over fallen humans at the point of disobedience. Sanctification of material creation is achieved by Jesus who is now reigning over it (Heb. 10.3), however, only He has a transformed spiritual body now since the resurrection, while the redeemed both in heaven and on earth await theirs. Adam was a mere type (Rom. 5.14). You probably should consider a ‘split headship’ view as is presented in Rom 5: Natural Headship in Adam, Representative Headship through adoption by Christ.
Also, questionable and speculative interpretations will not be load-bearing elements in your conceptional house. Better and more elegant formulations exist or can be conceived by a fuller grasp of the bible.

Jeremiah

“I’m not aware of kherem being used universally against the seven nations. Rather, God says that he will drive them out before Israel. Rather than being devoted to destruction, the norm is for them to be displaced—to self-evacuate. It is only those who refuse who are put to the sword.”

I believe this is correct, as far as understanding the sense of what happened. The issue was not so much the destruction of the people (i.e., their bloodline) so much as it was primarily about clearing a particular area. That required either driving out the people completely, or destroying them completely when necessary.

However, this is not spelled out for us in these words as such. We surmise it from the complete testimony of Genesis-Judges. The way the command went within the narrative was:

When God described his part it was with terms like “I will give you the land,” “I will drive them out,” etc, etc.

The practical way that was put to the Israelites was “You will go up into the land,” “you will take the land,” “you will inherit the land,” and regarding the people “You will devote them (the seven nations) to destruction.” (See Deut 7 and 20).

The way the narrative described the process in reflection is alternatively is “they devoted them to destruction,” “they drove them out,” “God drove them out,” etc.

So I agree kherem was not universally practiced against the seven nations, however kherem was the command given to the Israelites, with the implicit understanding that it was okay if those peoples left (i.e., the Israelites were under no obligation to pursue them out of the land to fulfill the kherem).

My curiosity was it sounded like you were saying the reasoning for the kherem commands was always a particular bloodline (i.e., the rephaiim/nephilim). Like in this later sentence that I did not initially quote,

“The kherem commands were instructions to eliminate specific clans descended from the sons of God.”

But simply from a numerical standpoint, the verb kharam as a command from God is used primarily towards the seven nations in the text of Pentateuch (and Joshua/Judges. I think only once (I’d have to double check) does God phrase the Israelite’s responsibility as “drive-out” (yarash) in the command form. (Of course the text often describes what they did as driving out, or failing to drive out, or God driving out, I’m simply thinking of what commands were explicitly given)

This also works out when kharam is used not as a command, but as a description of what the Israelites did. The ones they “kharamed” in the text were mainly the seven nations.

One of the primary references to the Anakim being “kharamed” occurs in Joshua, but the text is simply one part of a long list that describes the seven nations also being “kharamed.” In other words, the Anakim aren’t singled out in that reference.

Now, it should be said that Kharam is not actually a terribly common verb, 50 times in the OT, and only 23 in Gen-Judg. The imperative form only occurs 4 times in God’s mouth: twice concerning the seven nations and twice concerning the Amalekites in 1 Sam. In the original narrative in Numbers, the term is not used of what the Israelites were to do to Og. They were only told to do as they had done to Sihon, who was also not described with the kherem word (though obvious kherem is what they did). But of course, Og and Sihon’s land got folded into the promised land allotments. In fact, within the text of Numbers (and the recount in Deut) Israel getting Og’s land seems to be the primary reason Og is even hardened to go out against Israel.

This is why I see the kherem as being primarily directed at an area, rather than any people/bloodline. It was practiced within an area (the promised land), and occasionally outside that area for special circumstances, but the default within the promised land was kherem (with the implicit provision that there was no obligation to follow out anyone out of the land to complete kherem).

Also worth noting is that the text does not say the inhabitants of Bashan were descendants of Rephaiim, but rather that Og himself was. He is described as the last of the Rephaiim in the area.

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Hrmm, good points. To be up front, this view of kherem is something I’m drawing from Heiser; it’s not my own independent research as most of the rest of this content is. I guess I shouldn’t draw on people without checking eh. I’m not sure how he would respond to your argument; possibly he would say that there are textual clues that help us trace what is going on here, but you are correct to say that the kherem commands don’t single out particular groups. It’s definitely rather speculative to say they were directed purely against the Rephaiim. That fits well within the narrative, but it doesn’t seem warranted as an exclusive command. They would certainly have wiped out the Rephaiim if they were wiping out everyone else anyway…

Ima update the article to omit this. Makes it shorter too ;P

Jeremiah

Without having done extensive reading on the subject, my tentative assessment is that Dr. Heiser, in this particular proposal for kherem, is doing what all good scholars do (unfortunately, haha), which is over read all texts in light of their speciality.

Do you have a reference for where I could read Heiser putting forward his view of kherem? I have his dissertation (which I have only given a cursory look through). If it is in there I could read it. Might be worth a gentle pushback in the form of a paper. I always need paper topics.

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Haha, this is why I can never specialize :P

Mike does talk about it in Unseen Realm, but he also has a video up here which kind of summarizes the position: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sfNGIptyXU

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more of this in his forthcoming book as well, Reversing Hermon. But if not, you could always email him :) I’d be interested in reading your paper if you do write it.

Ben

Bnonn, I’m not sure where exactly to put this but I have two questions relating to this overall topic of the Bible’s supernatural worldview and man’s kingship. I’m on board with your writings here and offer these as questions rather than objections.

(1) If salvation involves co-reigning with Christ in the new heaven and new earth, does this mean that all believers — all saved humans — will have positions of authority in the NHNE, and that no humans will be mere subjects under authority? It’d be really strange if so; imagine a kingdom where everyone is king, or a member of the royal family, and there is no populace to be ruled.

One way of avoiding this very strange implication is by positing (a) that spiritual beings will be subject to man (for otherwise there would be no one to be ruled) and (b) that while humans will all rule, nevertheless humans will have greater or lesser positions in the ruling hierarchy. But it seems that if we grant (b), then we’re already committed to an inegalitarian conception of rulership-salvation (i.e. where the salvific benefit of co-reigning can be given in unequal degrees to different believers), and so we might as well be fine with a conception of salvation where not all believers have ruling functions in the NHNE. Perhaps we can simply read passages like 2 Tim. 2:12 in a way that avoids the implication that rulership is an essential benefit of salvation.

(2) If the context of Old Testament idolatry involved true interaction with various spiritual beings, what should we make of the OT passages which describe idols as vanities, as mere blocks of wood, etc.? I have in mind passages like Isa. 44:14-20 and Jer. 10:8-9.

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Hey Ben, these are both good questions that deserve a proper response. You may have noticed I’ve been dealing with objections by writing secondary posts that I can insert as related links in the main series. I think I’ll do that with both of your questions, although tbh I don’t really have a clear-cut answer to the first one. I think the Bible does indeed presuppose that there will be a hierarchy of rulership in the consummated kingdom (e.g., Matthew 20:21). But it also speaks of us ruling the nations (e.g., Revelation 2:26-27). I’m undecided on how that works. And it also cashes out rulership more broadly than a human hierarchy; remember, Adam’s original rule was over the animals, not over other people. Odd, but there it is. Of course, all of this could still be combined with our ruling angels; it certainly makes sense, contextually, to take Paul’s comment in 1 Corinthians 6:3 as a synecdoche for ruling, rather than merely as a note about our involvement in the damnation of wicked angels.

The issue of idols is not very difficult, because idols really were nothing. The pagans believed that the god inhabited—or, better nuanced, perhaps became conterminous with—the idol. But that belief traded on a monistic understanding of creation, which is of course false. Moreover, there’s no particular reason to think that most of the gods pagans worshiped were real. If you look at animistic religions, for instance, they will say there is a god for everything; whereas the Bible is clear that there are gods who rule over nations, not gods for storms and gods for flowers and gods for streams and whatnot.

Ben

Thank you, Bnonn. Probably the best resolution for the first question is simply denying that the Bible clearly presents salvation as involving some equal (or sufficiently similar, or sufficiently high) position of kingdom authority for all saints. The texts used to support this, as well as the theological argument based on an equality of salvific benefits for all believers, are not necessarily strong.

Good point on idolatry. So it appears that ancient pagans genuinely interacted with spiritual beings to some extent, but they also intermixed a true recounting of these interactions with superstition. This superstition was probably multifaceted, e.g. involving a monistic misunderstanding of certain spiritual beings’ relation to idols, or involving an unduly high reverence for one’s ancestors (I have in mind Odin, who may have been a real heroic man who was subsequently religiously elevated by various accretions).

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

On that note, characters like Odin and Hercules are interesting because of the obvious parallels to the Nephilim.

Jeremiah

The approach that Satan tempts Adam and Eve in a “plan to wrest dominion” is one I like a lot, and one that I don’t think I’ve come across many times before (or at least not explained this clearly).

A question though in regards to: “He apportions Adam’s kingdom to the archangels…” How is the move made from God breaking up the kingdoms of man to God giving the archangels headship over them? That feels like abit of a jump in logic.

Yana

I like that this kingdom theology framework makes a lot more sense of the Old Testament’s/Israel’s place in redemption history than a lot of contemporary Christian thought does. It explains why so much of the gospel preaching in Acts (Peter, Stephen, etc.) recounts the story of Israel (God’s kingdom) before saying anything in particular about Jesus. That always used to puzzle me; it seemed neither here nor there. Often Christians will mention creation and the fall in relation to the gospel narrative, but the whole OT Israel storyline never fits into that – it seems so random and unrelated. (Well, not anymore. :D)

But because of this, many Christians also have a very low view of the OT. Some will not accept theological argumentation using texts from the OT, and will actively denigrate and show contempt towards e.g. the law of Moses. They will also confuse the abrogation of the old covenant with an abrogation of the OT books, which obviously isn’t the case. I think kingdom theology rectifies that by putting the OT/Israel’s history in its rightful place and framework, without falling into the dispensational trap. It makes the Bible’s story a lot more cohesive. Thanks for sharing, Bnonn.

Yana

Question, though: You wrote about “the serpent and his cronies”. Who exactly are the cronies? Are ALL the archangels/sons of God on board with Satan’s rebellion? Revelation 12:4 is sometimes taken to mean that a third of the angels rebelled. But if that is the case, what are the others doing? Had the “good” ones been allotted any nations at Babel? Seems unlikely.

Sorry for the double post.

Dominic Bnonn Tennant

Hey Yana, I completely share your sentiments about this.

I think Revelation 12:4 means basically what you say: about a third of the angels rebelled and were cast down to earth. What isn’t so clear is whether this is a compressed narrative, where the rebellion happened in stages over time. Neither do we know exactly how the allotment of the nations was handled. Given that none of the nations seemed to move toward Yahweh, but rather all moved away from him, it doesn’t seem likely that any were put under angels loyal to God. Indeed, we know that angels loyal to God help with fighting against the ones that rule the nations (as in Daniel with the princes of Persia and Greece). Yet we also see in Daniel that the watchers make decrees on behalf of God.

Given these seemingly contradictory bits of data, I’d hazard a guess that the divine council is typically comprised only of those angels loyal to God, but that the ones who rule the nations are able to come into it at least on occasion (as Satan does in Job), or when summoned (perhaps as in Psalm 82). Having been thrown out of heaven, they don’t have the same kind of access any more that loyal angels do.